Henry 'Hank' Hartsfield was an astronaut who dealt with bad plumbing and fires
in the space shuttles Columbia, Challenger and Discovery

Henry 'Hank' Hartsfield, the American astronaut, who has died aged 80, piloted the final test flight of the space shuttle Columbia, flew the space shuttle Challenger on the voyage before its disastrous final outing, and commanded Discovery on its maiden voyage; he considered himself lucky to have survived.

His hairiest moments came during the Discovery expedition in 1984. The spacecraft had been scheduled for lift-off on June 26, and Hartsfield and his five-man crew were strapped into their seats as the countdown began at Cape Canaveral. Four seconds before lift-off, however, computers detected a problem in one of the main engines and the flight was aborted. Ten minutes later a fire was detected on the launch pad.

Discovery blasting off from the Kennedy Space Center on August 30 1984 (GETTY)

As the crew sat nervously in their cabin above some 500,000 gallons of volatile propellants, listening to reports of the fire around the engines more than 120ft below, Hartsfield considered giving the order to bail out, but decided against it.

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This was fortunate, as it turned out: because the fire was caused by burning hydrogen, it was invisible to the human eye — and had the astronauts used the normal emergency escape procedure across the service arm to “slidewire” escape baskets, they would almost certainly have run into the flames.

Discovery eventually took off at the end of August, but the voyage was not plain sailing. Not long into the mission a metre-long icicle formed over the nozzle that jettisoned waste water into the vacuum. Left intact, it could potentially have damaged the ship’s tail upon re-entry, necessitating costly repairs.

After an attempt to melt the ice by rotating the shuttle in the direction of the Sun, the crew decided to try to dislodge it by using the robotic arm of the space shuttle. Reasoning that any damage sustained to the shuttle was ultimately the responsibility of the commander, Hartsfield took the controls, taking care not to damage the solar tiles on the shuttle’s wing.

The lump broke free, but left the plumbing system out of action for the remainder of the voyage; and the crew were forced to resort to plastic bags, using old socks to soak up the urine and prevent zero-gravity leaks. “In retrospect that was a fun problem,” Hartsfield recalled, “but it wasn’t so much fun at the time.”

Discovery eventually landed at the Edwards Air Force base on September 5, having successfully completed a six-day mission. As it was 1984, the year cinema audiences were gripped by Ghostbusters , Hartsfield’s actions with the robotic arm earned the crew the sobriquet “Icebusters”.

The son of a bookkeeper, Henry Warren Hartsfield was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on November 21 1933 and took a degree at Auburn University, Alabama, where, when Chemistry proved to be something of a disaster — “I was always blowing up things and catching things afire,” he recalled — he switched to Physics. Following graduate work at Duke University and at the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, Hartfield entered the US Air Force in 1955, serving as a pilot with the 53rd Tactical Fighter Squadron in Germany.

After joining Nasa in 1969, he earned an advanced degree in Engineering Science from the University of Tennessee. Although he had joined as an astronaut, he had to wait 13 years before making his maiden flight. In the meantime he served in Nasa’s astronaut support crew and was part of the team behind Apollo 16 in 1972, the fifth mission to land men on the moon.

In 1982 he made his space debut as part of the two-man crew of the Columbia on its fourth and last test flight, a seven-day voyage in which Columbia orbited the earth 112 times and carried out a number of experiments, including studying the effects of weightlessness on plants such as algae and duckweed and animals such as the fruit fly and brine shrimp.

The voyage was credited with rekindling American interest in space, and Columbia would go on to make more than two dozen operational missions before its disastrous final voyage in 2003, when it broke up during re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere, killing all seven crew members on board.

Hartsfield’s third and final shuttle flight was as commander of an eight-person crew aboard the shuttle Challenger, which was carrying a German Spacelab, in October 1985. On its next flight, less than three months later, Challenger exploded shortly after take-off, killing all seven crew members on board.

By this time Hartsfield had circled the Earth 321 times, spending a total of 20 days, two hours and 50 minutes in space.

Hartsfield continued to work for Nasa on the ground and was part of the team that planned the International Space Station. After retiring from the agency, he was an executive at the Raytheon Corporation.

Hartsfield was described by his fellow Discovery crew member Richard “Mike” Mullane as “a man so far right on the political spectrum he made even the John Birch Society [a far-Right campaign group] look like a collection of hand-wringing, pantywaist liberals”.

His more politically moderate colleagues enjoyed teasing him about his views, a female crew member once giving him as a birthday present a copy of Ms magazine with a personal dedication written by the feminist Gloria Steinem.

Hank Hartsfield was inducted into the US Astronauts Hall of Fame in 2006.

He married, in 1957, Judy Massey, who survives him with a daughter. Another daughter predeceased him last year.